The Secret to effective academic management: Automated lesson planning

To all the teachers and principals out there, we know time is scarce for you. You are always splitting your schedule between instructing classes, conducting assessments, evaluation, meeting with parents and extra-curricular activities. Teaching even a single class of 30-35 students involves a massive amount of work like formulating lesson plans, preparing assignments, evaluating the assignments and more. Among all the roles and responsibilities of a teacher, lesson planning is of utmost importance. It helps the teacher to be well prepared and be aware of what he/she is teaching. Further, it also helps the teacher to proceed with the syllabus in a systematic way. But, effective lesson planning is a tedious and time-consuming process. Teachers are hardly left with any time to effectively plan the lesson and have a clear roadmap of the chapter.

With the proliferation of technology devices, tools and platforms, the K-12 sector is now equipped to help teachers eliminate the tedious lesson planning task. Therefore, schools need digital platforms that facilitate faster creation of lesson plans to enhance education. Next Learning Platform by Next Education stands up to the promise of facilitating lesson plan creation with ease in no time.

But what is the Next Learning Platform? Next Learning Platform is a fully enabled cloud-based platform for the school’s administrative and academic requirements. The Next Learning Platform is a powerful combination of the school management system, course management system, static and adaptive assessments and award-winning content that meets all the academic and administrative needs of a school. 

The lesson planning module of Next Learning Platform facilitates the planning process for the academic year, both in terms of the resources used and as well as session management. Pre-created lesson plans and resource mapping make it easier for teachers to check summaries, learning objectives, concepts and assign audio-visual modules to be used in any chapter.

Let’s quickly gain insights into the importance of an automated lesson planning tool.

The need for an automated lesson planning tool

Reduces teacher burden

In the quest to impart the best knowledge and implement the latest pedagogies, teachers are always on toes to create assessments and homework assignments. Besides tiresome academic work, teachers are burdened with additional administrative duties. Hence, they are unable to effectively plan the lessons at the beginning of the academic year. An automated lesson planning tool can ease the burden on the teachers through pre-created lesson plans, summaries and learning objectives.

Curriculum planning

A major challenge faced by teachers is maintaining a consistent lesson plan across multiple courses and monitoring the progress of the same. An automated lesson planning tool helps in creating lesson plans for each chapter and share the same with other teachers as well.

Continuous evaluation

Creation of assignments and continuous evaluation consumes a lot of time and as a result, teachers don’t get enough time for weaker students. An automated lesson planning tool facilitates creation, tracking and evaluation of assignments.

Improves learning outcomes

Teachers can track the digital resource usage and also assign digital content based on the student’s individual learning needs. Therefore, it becomes easier for teachers to bridge students’ learning gaps. 

But how does the lesson planning module of the Next Learning Platform help teachers overcome these challenges? As described earlier, the Next Learning Platform streamlines the teaching-learning process, thereby empowering teachers to implement the latest pedagogy and enrich the learning experience.

Following are the key features of the lesson planning module of the Next Learning Platform that proves beneficial for teachers:

Simply put, the lesson planning module of the Next Learning Platform provides a pre-created lesson plan and resource mapping to all teachers. Therefore, this makes it easy for them to check summaries, learning objectives, concepts and audio-visual modules to be used in any chapter. A remarkable feature of this module is that it enables teachers to customise lesson plans according to their requirements.

Academic planning 

Most schools are not able to implement the latest pedagogy due to inadequate delivery systems, tracking methods and proper planning and training for teachers and academicians. Next Learning Platform helps schools adopt the latest pedagogical approach and technological innovations in education.

Academic planning helps schools to identify and plan curricula, co-curricular and extra curricular activities for the year. Next Learning Platform helps schools to enrich their teaching-learning process by amalgamating modern methods of teaching with the traditional classroom practices. Through the Next Learning Platform, schools can seamlessly implement online course work, flipped classrooms, blended learning, group and project-based learning. It is advisable for schools to divide their pedagogy in such a way that at least 40% online learning should be included in the curriculum at the secondary grade.

Course planning 

Customizing the course planning is possible with the Next Learning Platform. This includes breaking the syllabus to cover over 36/38 weeks, mapping learning outcomes, aligning daily lesson plans with different teaching strategies, compiling resources which can include experiential learning activities – projects, quizzes and various other learner engaging activities, identifying differentiated activities like integrated projects, mapping cross-curricular links and creating assessments. Course planning using the Next Learning Platform keeps all the stakeholders informed about how various topics are covered and progress of the chapter. 

Defining new age pedagogy

The learning processes, either online or classroom or otherwise, have to be planned to keep in mind the age group and learning abilities of students. Incorporating digital content in the classroom can help in a smooth transition towards online teaching. To facilitate this smooth transition, Next Learning Platform provides a state-of-the-art feature, Live Lectures that facilitate remote learning by connecting students and teachers in real-time. 

Further, teachers can assign homework and track the submission of the same within the Next Learning Platform. Hence, it is imperative for schools to recognize the need for an online learning platform and adapt their teaching-learning process to achieve this.

Assessment Framework

Next Learning Platform facilitates a grading system to evaluate the performance of each student and enable the teacher to choose an assessment strategy as per each student’s learning needs. This creates a personalised learning environment for students. Most importantly, Next Learning Platform enables students to prepare for international benchmark tests and competitive exams in their assessment system.

In a nutshell,

• Next Learning Platform helps teachers in creating courses and modules in sync with various educational boards. 
• It also keeps teachers updated with their daily planner in which timetable is integrated with lesson plans. They can check her timetable and the responsibilities assigned to them for every period. 
• Now teachers don’t have to waste much time in creating lesson plans. Next Learning Platform provides access to Next Education’s standard lesson plans and resource planning which makes it easier for teachers to keep up with learning objectives, concepts and chapter-wise audio-visual modules. 
• Additionally, teachers can share and discuss lesson plans with other teachers of the same class so that there are less iterations during the academic year.
• To enable faster learning among students, teachers can upload digital content in the form of ebooks, MP3s, PDFs, images and videos.

The entire teaching process can be streamlined with the Next Learning Platform, from creating lesson plans, adding online study material, creating assignments to grading them. This will add months worth of free time to every teacher’s teaching schedule. Not only will this allow them to spend more time with students and addressing their educational needs, but the change may also give teachers precious time for their skill enhancement.

Leverage the benefits of Next Learning Platform into your pedagogy and provide an awesome experience to your students and teachers.